Monday, January 28, 2013

My
belt buckle includes a cure for birch. It’s leather and conciliatory and
foliage. I frequent my clothes in the morning and dress them in my body as if
reflection on life were ghostly. It is. It is a ghost. It is like the greenery
surrounding an airport. I elude it when the crowd sweetens and an emotion
tumbles through my ribs in a nimble burning purity.

I
am Speckles the Clown. I act my bohemia vertiginously. I am a bowl of chowder
rawhide raw. My ear chats the jug. My legs are emperors of mediation. The
ground is my ground. The air is accessory to my notwithstanding. I am a naked
pound of autumn. My addictions are subtle and will crash into you if prompted.
I start at a penumbra to unravel the sky. I say to the sun: beam into me. I
have an England to mirror.

History
is silly. It just is. I fall into its books with itching swollen pounds of
postulation. Historically, the clown is a figure of sacred nonsense. I sway my
spoons with amber. This occurs in the kitchen, which is inherently silly. What
kitchen isn’t silly? Kitchens are silly.

Food
is silly. Eating is silly. Yet the camaraderie of sharing a table is not silly.
It is sacred. It becomes silly when the jello arrives. Everyone sits stationed
at their chair wearing a cap of bells. An aesthetic grammar unbosoms our
smacking. You can tell it is aesthetic by the way it flops thinly on the
hammerhead and spits.

Break
caustic we tongue. The grapefruit answers by forming a pulley. It creaks, and
the words get happening. We are aghast with sandwiches. The exhibit grabs at
our need for black and personifies plants.

Extend
oats to your endeavor if it does excerpts. And resembles a horse. It may be a
horse. It may be clean and daylight and ruminative and matter. Gaze at your
throat behind the blaze. If it trembles with syntax than a sentence is
happening. You must hop through it violet and crumpled.

There
is a crab on the beach. It plays at its umpteenth vividness with legs and
strength and landscape and sand. The railroad is extra. It just is.

I
embark on a novel. I am like that crab. I am the shovel of the feathers it
dreams. My novel gulps assembly. Anything and everything. I think of oil and
velvet. They become pounds of gnarly description, a gaudy sag to the nature of
words. An abhorrence whistles a smell. Fireworks boil a headlight. Hammer on,
dear nothingness, I say, hammer on.

There
is a resource that explains these things and explains its throats. I shout
walking and demonstrate it by glass. I build a fence, since digging is indigo.
This will be a chapter in my novel. I use a tablespoon to dig the potholes.
There are roots. I work the spoon through the roots. The neighbor recommends
that I use a pothole digger, and have children. He does not know I am a clown,
and sometimes require the use of codeine.

Crack,
hear my plea. I say, go away neighbor. The neighbor goes away.

I
rip the heat into pink. I can do these things because there are words to convey
these events. There are propane and gasoline, and waves and dancing. Heft
explodes the drum. Heft and sticks. I talk my fork into being in my book. This
is it: my fork. It signifies fork. And napkins. Harnesses and horses are
themselves. They tell the helter-skelter world that they are malleable, and
like clowns. That is to say words expand into bedlam, and lose control in their
own necessity.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

I
envy people with offices. Lawyers especially, because they’re surrounded by
books. Thick tomes full of laws and precedents and tragedies and spines with
golden letters. Offices have an inherent respectability lending a feeling of
solemn purpose to one’s endeavor. If you’re a writer, hoping for a quiet space
to write when the world and its messy exigencies and blisters and blobs and
children and fracases burst in on you at any moment, an office would be ideal.

Or
would it? Would the sobriety of rigid corners and thick oak desks and long
shiny conference tables inhibit the impulses of creativity?

There
is something in the atmosphere of an office that imposes a need to conform, be
polite, courteous, deferential, efficient. Creativity is the opposite of these.
Creativity has nothing to do with efficiency. Or courtesy or obedience or
tractability or acquiescence. Creativity arouses defiance, transport, ecstasy, fire,
and subversive energies. There is always an element of destruction, of
contrariness, of going against the grain. Friction, heat, angst, and selfish, riotous
abandon.

Writing
requires a space that is outside the framework of time and its daily
responsibilities. The Protestant work ethic, Lutheran sobriety, robotic, insect
compliance. You can’t be a drone and an eccentric at the same time. Eccentric
means, literally, you are outside the circle. On your own. A selfish jerk.
Self-indulgent. Willful. Defiant. An insufferable prima donna. And probably
poor and struggling to make the rent.

Writing
requires a space that is primarily mental. It has less to do with the physical
dimension of walls and ceilings and more to do with how you feel. What are you
capable of dreaming? Cooking up in that skull of yours? It helps to be a
Prospero. A magician creating havoc and storms. An outcast with an impressive
library and a head full of ganglions bursting with ideas.

It’s
difficult finding that level of sensitivity. It requires an abundant amount of
idleness. Space for reverie. Drugs can help, but they’re more likely to create
problems. Drugs are expensive and ultimately catch up with you and fuck with
your health and sense of well-being. But you can learn to think like a drug.
Don’t take heroin: be heroin. Don’t eat peyote buttons: be a peyote button.

It’s
really just a matter of allowing your self space to be. Being, in and of
itself, is creative. Being is subversive. Hamlet was right on with his question
about to be or not to be. That’s what it comes down to. Every time. To be or
not to be. That really is the question.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

I am in a war against the
literal. I have sewn these words together to make a stand of birch. I wander
the earth gathering moon shadows and swords. Kerosene dots punctuate the Dakota
night. An apparition of words hops through a calculus problem and falls into a
trance. Rubber toys visit the sad navigation of a crew of astronauts, puzzled
as they gaze through their porthole.

The time is perfect for
strawberries. I feel explicit and reproductive. I push my mind into words.
Pronouns inflated with blood glitter like knobs. A wraith of steam is tattooed
to an ocean doing celestial gymnastics.

Experience is red when it
slides through time. The airport runs wild with colors and rain, the atmosphere
swollen with supposition. We assume we will fly. A crew of men grease the
airplane. If there is enough faith to lift it into the air, we will arrive in
time to see Arizona open itself to the wax of opinion.

There is a cactus that pulls
on our eyes and makes us see its full reality. There is a motel nearby with
appliances that swarm with buttons and power. Beds like angels bouncing on a
description of bone.

I’m sitting at a desk,
filling a page with muscle and sound. I believe the fork is a form of frozen
fire. I hear the depths of the ocean hanging upside down. The color green mocks
the turquoise water and salt and mistletoe lead to a brutal relationship with
the planet. We seek redemption in the anguish of construction. We employ string
for our amusement. The joining of wood is a pleasure measured in sawdust and dusk.
A pool of emotion sweetens the shiver of ghosts. If I pull the curtains open, I
can see various forms of movement deform the frontier of gravity.

I fold my emotions and put
them in a drawer of the heart. Anguish slobbers with thorns and balloons. One of
them pops. A shattered mirror goes in pursuit of a lip.

Morality enhances the
experience of clothes. Nudity is something very different. If I write down a
description of a woman’s breast, the paper grows profligate with symptoms of
palpability. I carry the sky in a basket of clouds. I look for signs of
monarchy. The genius of clouds bridges the crackling sky.

Fingers were invented by
doorknobs. That should be obvious. Checkout time is noon. It is always noon.
Midnight is so very different. It tastes of impending intrigue. An excerpt from
Baudelaire blazing on the page like a road flare.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

We
walk upright, our skin is naked and tender, our capacity for invention
magnificent. Our sensations galvanize us into action, the depiction of animals
of stunning grace, the murmur of subterranean rivers.

A
rag of infinity has been ripped from the wall of time and hangs here, a moon
shadow trembling with claws. Picture this: strawberries sparkling with freshly
fallen rain. It is a false image. It is the image of a pronoun stuffed with
strawberry jam. Every time I push my mind to assemble these things with a set
of words I feel like a washing machine grown arrogant with buttons and power.

Can
you believe everything I say? Anything at all that I say? Yes. Believe this.
Believe that money is the fecal matter of the spiritually bankrupt.

I
believe that there are certain pains that glow like a whisper of crystal. And
that the right combination of words will climb into the sun and become a giant
cabbage running wild with colors and bombs.

Emotion
auctions the heart. It goes to the highest bidder, who is a woman of 40 from
Beaumont, Texas. She takes a drug that causes silk and literature. One day she
will be on television. Meanwhile, she is happy to flutter through the room like
an insect with black shiny wings and nipples like dead violins.

A
Rembrandt brown walks across a canvas exasperated with bad jokes and convulses
in the wind and rain. A swirl of universe sputters in the mouth like a mountain
brook in love with communism. It says surrealism is alive to the unraveling of
perspective. Well, I already knew that, but that’s ok. I still enjoyed writing
it down.

Words
tremble with strange demands. They celebrate the spine of a divine
scintillation. Their hallucinations seize the wind and fall into hypnogogic sensation.
If anything of this is too vague, please let me know. Right now I am filling a
void with the ageless exaltation of antelope bounding over the crest of a butte
in Wyoming. Later I will set the oven for 350 degrees and slide a tray of
lasagna in. All of this will later become apparent in emotion, sensation, and
dreams, which are the alembic the alchemists called a philosopher’s egg.

This
was written in my sleep in the year 2013 using a bottle of perfume, a journey
of universal connectivity, syllables secreted into a web of convulsive silk,
and eight supple legs scampering about with an animal eye and a pound of sound
condensed into teeth.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

I
am steeped in alias. Veins inflated with pronouns. Identity is mostly steam
from a boiling despair. My palette glitters with its toys. My swamp widens into
exhortation. I dribble parables. The mouth is a house of malleable infantry. I
carry a city of stentorian sounds.

Here
comes a float heaving with pink. Take the moon elevator and strike the water.
Grease happens when the engine is broken. Catch an airplane and prickle it into
knobs. I write almond and cook it into fiddles. There is an oath that lifts it.
And an oath that demands granite.

I
got spectrums. I got packages and mail. I got maturity and cream. We are
together in this world. We are beyond recognition. We rattle and stomp. We
summon angels and bounce.

There
is a tiger we sputter and a perception we wobble. We watch it progress into poetry
and behave like a sky. Black makes it real and blue makes it feel.

We
manufacture what excites us. The heave of labor is built within the saw. Slide
your ponder to the tip of the branch. Mushroom your flip into scent and
sensation. It’s not a joke. Not entirely. Some of it is broth and some of it is
both.

We
haul our hands by fingers. We navigate digits by fireworks and thought. We beg
this emptiness to think. A spoon opens its energy and the road is suitably
squeezed. War the genetic clench. Become a muscle in a Mediterranean garret.

I
seek the tolerance of dawn. Soap is for scrubbing the sun is for scrounging.

Generate
life by crashing into light. Diagnosis boils with the morality of the seashore,
which is enhanced by cloth and amusement. Your cactus cuts please cut it out.
The mirror is tangled in its own listening. Your face sounds irresistible.

This
is my wild cabbage buckle and this is my myriad minnow tilted into heresy. What
bomb do I drop to see your spectral elegance? I bungled the hammer. Description
is exasperating. We’ve picked the headland clean. There are only a few skates
and speed bumps left to talk and catch the last light of the setting sun. Let
us ruminate on pursuit.On the pools and
illusions as the dimming light sweetens the distance and ghosts tug at Cézanne.

I
am swollen now, and full of gnarled emotion. The garden path is teasing. But
the gravity across an airplane accepts it to mirror the chrome.

A
middle-aged woman with blonde hair wearing a fur coat glides through a four-way
stop in a black SUV just as I come running across. When I am inches from her
window, she glances at me with a look of indifference.

Frost
on a bed of ivy.

A
thick layer of ice on the sidewalk, remnant of a garden hose left running.

Black
silhouette of a man walking on a yellow triangular sign against an opalescent
sky in late December. The sign is a warning for disabled pedestrians. Yet the
iconic man on the sign is walking robustly.

The
man gets down from the sign. He slides down the pole. He has no features. No
nose, no eyes, no ears. He is simply a man walking. He is a sign. He is a sign
of walking. He is a parody of walking. He is a flirtation with walking, an icon
designed to catch the attention of drivers. People behind the wheels of their
cars. Or motorcycle handlebars. Look out, the man says mutely in silhouette,
there may be people crossing here whose bodies may have been compromised by age
or injury or disease. But the man is momentarily gone. It is just a yellow
sign. A yellow triangle. The man on the sign goes to the library to read a
book. He reads a book of silhouettes. He reads a book of signs. He learns how
to warn people. He learns how to deliver a clear message. He returns to the
sign and climbs back up. He assumes his position, his left leg moving jauntily
forward, his expressionless silhouette communicating a message as clearly as
possible. Watch out. Pay attention. You are in a car. I am on a sign. Together
we make a world. A world of warnings and signs. A world of attention and
solicitation. Highways and maps. Incongruities and substitution and straw.
Fickleness and treachery. Gladness and compassion. It’s all there. It’s all a
sign. A big sign. A sign of sagas. Abody of law. Sunlight burning through mist creating opalescence and thaw.

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.